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www.reuters.com
Sony to spend 2 trln yen on strategic investments over next three years
Sony Group (6758.T) said on Wednesday it will spend 2 trillion yen ($18.39 billion) over the next three years on strategic investments, including a push to expand subscribers to its gaming and entertainment services.
Sony probably saw this thread.I wonder how they plan to connect 1 billion people to Sony services. Are they building a Netflix and Disney+ competitor?jk
| Sony Group (6758.T) said on Wednesday it will spend 2 trillion yen ($18.39 billion) over the next three years on strategic investments, including a push to expand subscribers to its gaming and entertainment services. Sony said in a statement it would accelerate investments in mobile and online services with the aim of expanding the number of consumers directly connected to its services to 1 billion people from 160 million. |
) and Music pass. A clever thing to do to increase adoption of multi-subs would be to include a little bit of each in the other passes so, if you have the Entertaiment pass you might get to play some older games that are part of a series but if you want to play the sequels you need the gaming pass. And similarly on the Gaming pass you could have access to the first season or first few episodes of a series that encourages you to get the Entertainment pass as well to carry on watching. Sony have a ridiculous amount of media that they could really exploit if they execute the plan well and should have really established themselves already as a top tier service provider instead of sitting on their hands while the likes of Netflix, Amazon, Microsoft and Disney have been steadily growing.
I would say that anime is equally if not more niche than gaming and someone who wants an anime streaming service is probably not going to want the increased cost of included movies, shows and music that they are not interested in. Having maybe one main spotlight sub that includes a lot of popular mainstream stuff from each of the sub-subs and then the individual specialist subs that are bolt on could be the way to go. Yes they want to appeal to the casual mainstream but also use it as a gateway into the more hardcore fandom. Just going off the rationale that every hardcore fan of something started off with a casual interest in it that developed into something more dedicated.
So, they could have a main sub service (I called spotlight) that gives Access to a curated selection of quality content taken from all of Sonys different media arms including movies, TV series, games, music etc. But have it on a rolling in/out basis where content is regularly cycled. If you are casual then there will always be fresh stuff to consume but, if you want the sequel to a movie for example then you have to bolt on the movie pass to get access to the full catalogue. Say you get invested in a series you have to get the entertainment pass to watch the next season. If someone starts playing a game that then cycles out they might sub to the gaming pass to carry on playing it. They could offer the spotlight sub fairly cheaply knowing that sooner or later people will generally bolt on further subs, hell they may even be able to go f2p with this model.
It’s probably happening. But Sony is using the playstation branding instead of creating a new movie streaming brand with game streaming as an added value.
